Oracle: Did you know...

Tips from Tier1 Experts on Oracle Technology

In this section, Tier1 experts will keep you informed of the latest tips, information and solutions for Oracle technology. Together, these Tier1 experts have an average of 20+ years of Oracle experience and they are sharing there knowledge with you...everything from Oracle's E-Business Suite to OBIEE and Essbase.

You have options when it comes to Disaster Recovery with the E-Business Suite

Business continuity plans are necessary within any organization. The planning, preparation, and testing that goes into a business continuity plan is critical to ensure that your company data is not sacrificed should an event occur that renders your systems unavailable.

Disaster recovery is one part of a company's Business Continuity Plan. DR is certainly a critical piece of any EBS install to protect financial, manufacturing, HR/Payroll, etc. data. Unfortunately, DR is often neglected, not tested, and assumed to be in working order should a dire event occur. It is Tier1's practice to implement, monitor daily, and test annually a client's DR procedures. This is the only practice that will ensure restore and recovery of your EBS and data when the unexpected happens.

There are many decisions that need to be considered when developing a DR plan

What type of DR event are you planning for: server loss, site loss, or regional loss?

How much data can you sustain to lose?

How long can your systems be unavailable?

Is it acceptable for performance of the Production E-Business Suite to be impacted by a DR solution?

The best DR plan for your company depends on your requirements for the questions listed above. Protecting against regional loss of your systems also protects against server and site loss. However, it may not be a feasible approach if you cannot withstand any downtime of your systems. Likewise, if your company cannot accept any data loss, a regional plan may also not be feasible as the bandwidth requirements may be too great to sustain an acceptable level of performance with the E-Business Suite.

Once you have defined your requirements for DR, you can use a combination of the solutions below to begin building your DR plan for the E-Business Suite database and application tiers:

Tier1 has implemented many different combinations of the above technologies to satisfy our customer's business continuity and disaster recovery objectives. Many customers choose Data Guard, Oracle's premier replication technology, to satisfy their DR requirements. Data Guard is configurable and allows the customer to strike an appropriate balance between uptime, data protection, and application performance. However, Data Guard requires appropriate licensing from Oracle and some customers do not have the luxury of paying the additional licensing fees to implement Data Guard. Therefore, with Tier1's assistance, guidance, and experience, these customers can choose one, or a combination, of the above options to meet their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery objectives.

Oracle Trusted Partitions

Oracle Trusted Partitions allow for one-to-one correlation of Oracle Technology licenses in a Virtual Environment, regardless of total processors (cores) in the underlying physical server cluster. Also, the licenses can be distributed in any configuration that matches vCPU's to Processor license count.

Generally speaking, one Oracle Enterprise Database license equates to 2 cores, and that equates to 2 vCPU's per core. So an eight (8) License Agreement would allow for 32 vCPU's to be configured as you see fit. Without regard to the total core count of the VM server cluster. That maximizes your Technology License Agreement to the last vCPU available. Trusted Partitions are certified with Oracle's Virtual Compute Appliance(VCA) engineered system.

Did you know that Tier1 is offering a Private Oracle Cloud solution on Oracle's VCA? This means that you could be saving money on processor licenses! Find out more information by clicking here.

You can now seamlessly create formatted bank checks from Oracle EBS Release 12x

Release 12 Payments and BI Publisher provides EBS users the ability to create bank checks solely within Oracle EBS, with no need for third party packages like Optio or Evergreen. Organizations that have upgraded from Release 11 are eliminating complexity and simplifying support by using Oracle EBS’s XML-based solution.

BI Publisher is a template-based reporting solution that is tightly integrated with all EBS modules and enables users to deliver their documents easier and faster than traditional reporting tools. The use of BI Publisher allows a custom check format design to include all of the required bank-specific requirements in the final output and includes the following capabilities:

Multiple seeded check layout formats provided by Oracle

Conditional formatting of check logos and addresses

Check Signature logic based on amount and other check data

Use of plain paper security stock – no pre-printed logos or numbering required.

Tier1 has completed over 20 BI Publisher check implementations with major banks including:

Wells Fargo

Citibank

JPMorgan Chase

Bank of America

Chase

M&T Bank

PNC

Citizens

Along with check formatting, we’ve generated bank ACH and Positive Pay files as part of the overall payment generation process.

The migration to BI Publisher checks is simpler, with most time spent coordinating with your bank and submitting test check runs. The design, development, and testing of a new format can be completed in a matter of days.

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) now has several ways to deliver dashboards and reports on mobile devices

OBIEE, Oracle’s premier business intelligence product, can be viewed on tablet and smart phone devices as

A website, as if you were accessing it from a laptop

An app for Apple iPhone and iPad

A specially-designed dashboard created with Oracle’s new Mobile App Designer

The original Apple app has received a facelift with new releases and users will quickly navigate your content, since the tool uses the familiar tap and swipe gestures. This app can automatically take a multi-region dashboard and render each region on a separate screen. Dashboard prompts appear as a scrolling region at the top.

Beginning with release 11.1.1.7.1, Oracle offers the Mobile App Designer. This flexible tool allows for building and distributing dashboards and reports crafted specifically for tablet and smart phone devices. And the best part is the output can be accessed by any smart device, not just iPhones and iPads!

As more and more smart devices penetrate the normal business functions, OBIEE offers enough options to satisfy all your users.

Here are just some of the OBIEE services Tier1 offers

Installation and configuration

Upgrades and patching

Data model design and development

ETL development

Repository design and development

Security strategy development and implementation

Dashboard design and development

OBIEE/BI Publisher integration

The latest release of Oracle Hyperion Planning version 11.1.2.3 now supports the creation of Aggregate Storage Option (ASO) Essbase databases when you define your Planning application

The ASO cube will still be defined as a separate application, and metadata management is still not supported for ASO using EPMA.

Having ASO as a part of your Planning application allows you to develop an Essbase reporting cube for your budget application without purchasing the Essbase extended license. You can also use your Planning reporting licenses with Essbase ASO.

The benefits of using ASO with Planning are:

Planners can see the impact of their changes immediately across the organization hierarchy.

Final Scenarios, Versions and past Years can be removed from the Planning input cube allowing for faster processing.

ASO will allow you to merge additional detail data like Product or Customer sales not impacted by the plan to a single ASO reporting cube for more robust analysis.

There are some limitation though such as:

There is still no support for Calculation scripts or Business rules with ASO.

Member formulas will need to be developed using MDX not the traditional Essbase formula language.

Planning does not generate XREFs on ASO databases, so some other cube linkage process is required such as Essbase partitions.

Dynamic time series members are still not supported for the Period Dimension in an ASO application.

Creating and refreshing security filters is not supported for ASO databases. This means you cannot retrieve data from ASO databases from a third party source. You can only retrieve data through Planning either directly or, for Financial Reporting, through the Planning ADM driver.

Even with the above restrictions, the ability to use ASO as part of a planning and reporting solution without purchasing additional licenses is a step in the right direction.